


damian clone triplets!!!

by happyrobins



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Clones, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, clone damians and actual damian, human experimentation (referenced), post batman inc #8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 16:11:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1556360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyrobins/pseuds/happyrobins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce finds and rescues three baby Damian clones~!!! babies~!!</p>
            </blockquote>





	damian clone triplets!!!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [narfiffiftic (maladictive)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maladictive/gifts).



The lab is a wreck. Smashed machinery and the charred ashes of documents and spilled chemicals on the floor. Glass shards crunch under Bruce’s feet and clink together as they’re dragged along by his cape.

Ra’s and his people left in a hurry. It seems they were thorough in taking any important evidence with them and destroying what was left behind. Bruce doesn’t think he’ll find much here.

And then he hears the cry. A baby’s cry.

He digs through the wreckage towards the source of the noise, seized with a sudden desperation as he shifts the rubble and metal. This all reminds him too strongly of that day in Africa when the warehouse crumbled into flames before his eyes, of smoke and fear and failure.

The muffled crying stops, and he forgets how to breathe. He curses himself for how his hands start shaking—he can’t afford clumsiness, not now. They’re still shaking when he pulls out a small baby, covered in dust and chemical residue from its smashed incubation pod—that’s what this place was, he realizes, a cloning lab—but miraculously unscathed.

Bruce looks down at the infant with eyes the same colour as his and he knows— He knows. That this is exactly what Damian looked like as a baby. 

The child makes a noise like a hiccup and reaches small hands towards Bruce’s face. Bruce shushes him gently. While he’s wrapping the child up in his cape to keep him warm, he hears another noise. A whimper, close by.

Bruce’s stomach drops. There are  _more_  of them. He shouldn’t be surprised, but he is. He’s horrified.

The second child wails angrily until Bruce finds him. He screams his lungs off as Bruce carefully extracts him from the broken pod. His face is scrunched and red, his hands balled up into flailing fists. There’s a scratch on the side of his head, shallow and superficial but still worrisome.

His crying sets off the other one. Bruce tries his best to calm down the two squalling infants and fails miserably.

It isn’t long before he finds a third baby, this one with closed eyes and silent in a way that terrifies him. He’s relieved when he sees the child is breathing, and when he squirms in Bruce’s hands. But he knows they need medical attention as soon as possible, all three.

There are three of them. Bruce turns over every piece of rubble twice and only finds three. The rest… If there  _were_  more—and he hopes more than anything there aren’t—were taken away when the lab was abandoned. Ra’s scientists could be resuming their experiments at this very moment.

This isn’t what Bruce was searching for when he decided to hunt down and investigate every base Ra’s has touched. He doesn’t think he’ll find what he’s looking for; not here, not today, as much as it kills him. But this is what he found.

 

—

 

Bruce can’t tell the children apart. Not that it’s easy, with them being genetically identical. But even from the first day Alfred doesn’t seem to have a problem. Bruce supposes it’s not an issue until they have names, something Alfred has been bringing up frequently and Bruce doesn’t even want to think about right now.

“The boys are all fast asleep at the same time, for once. Truly the kind of event that only happens once in a blue moon.“ says Alfred as he sets down a dinner— _breakfast_ , actually, Bruce sees when he glances away from the computer screens—tray down beside Bruce’s elbow. “They’ll be awake soon. Perhaps you would like to go see them before they are. They are quite pleasant when they’re not awake to cry and bite.”

Alfred always makes sure to tell Bruce such things about the babies, as if Bruce just isn’t getting the hint. He mentions which toys each of them favour (too often the exact same one), how they all cut their second tooth on the same day, how Titus has taken it upon himself to protect them and sleeps outside their bedroom door every night.

Bruce has been having difficulty looking Alfred in the eyes since that night he returned to the manor with three babies and Alfred had sighed, looking at him like he was a child who had just brought home a box of stray animals.

“I couldn’t leave them behind. They would have died,” he says, for what he’s sure is the dozenth time. He doesn’t think he’s trying to convince Alfred as much as he’s trying to convince himself. He still can’t quite believe that there are three children upstairs—biologically  _his_  children. “This is the only place they’ll be safe. If I send them away, Ra’s could find them.” 

He could find them and experiment on them, turn them into  _weapons_  and monsters. Bruce won’t let that happen again.

Damian was killed by a clone. Now these clones are all Bruce has left of him.

That’s going to change soon, though, if all works like he’s planned. He’s close to a solution. So close. Just a few more tests, a few more adjustments, and it’ll be ready.

 

—

 

“Don’t you think you should get some sleep, y’know, at least once a week? Alfred said he hasn’t seen you upstairs in days.”

Bruce turns in his chair to see Dick standing there, holding one of the clones. Bruce… doesn’t know which one. The baby has one hand in his mouth and the other clutching at Dick’s ear possessively.

Before Bruce can protest, Dick walks closer and maneuvers the baby so that Bruce  _has_ to reach out and hold him or else he’ll fall. Tiny fingers reach up and grab at Bruce’s nose, and Bruce thinks… He thinks this is the first one he found. He’s not certain.

“I’m fine,” he tells Dick tersely.

“I doubt that, but okay.” Dick tousles the baby’s hair, causing him to give a squeal of delight, and meets Bruce’s dry, bloodshot eyes in a way that makes Bruce wish he was wearing the cowl. “It sure would be nice if you actually talked to us once in a while. Like, about these kids? We had to hear about them from Alfred, and none of us have any idea about whether you’re planning to keep them or not.”

The baby wriggles to nestle more comfortably against Bruce’s chest. He fists a hand in Bruce’s cape and Bruce gently tries to pry it from his fingers, giving up when it soon becomes clear that won’t be happening. “It would probably be best to put them up for adoption. Find them all proper families.”

Dick shrugs. “Probably.”

“Maybe once they’re a few months older Ra’s won’t bother looking for them any longer. They’ll be too old to be viable for any experiments he has in mind.”

“Maybe.”

“This isn’t the sort of life to raise young children around. We both know that. It’s too dangerous. They deserve better.”

“You’ve got a point.” Dick leans against the computer console and crosses his arms, blocking it from Bruce on purpose. “And now I’m going to tell you everything wrong with what you just said. First, Bruce, you  _can’t_  separate them. They’re like— They  _are_ triplets. They belong together. You and I both know that as long as the League of Assassins is intact, these kids won’t be safe. And…  _Fuck_ ,” he swears, raking a hand through his hair in frustration, his mouth an angry line. He might be yelling, if the baby wasn’t here. They both would. Maybe that’s why he brought the baby with him in the first place, to keep them from acting in ways they’ll regret. “I know it’s scary, but remember you have me and Alfred, and Tim and Babs and Cass and everyone else. It’s not impossible. You just have to make the effort to actually be their dad. And start by _naming_   _them_. It’s been weeks. They need names. It’s important.”

The child in Bruce’s arms starts whimpering and trying to squirm free. The only thing Bruce can think of doing is hold the baby out towards Dick with a frown that doesn’t allow argument. Dick sighs as he takes the child, rubbing his back soothingly until he quiets down.

“Make a decision, Bruce. Don’t just ignore them and pretend that’s okay. That’ll hurt them as much as anything else. I know you still haven’t let go of Damian.” Dick holds the baby tighter, a sad, faraway look in his eyes. “I— I can’t, either. I don’t think any of us will ever be able to… But these kids—”

“I need more time,” Bruce says, turning back to the computers. “I can do this. I know I can fix it. All I need is more time.”

“I trust you,” says Dick. “I really want to believe you’re right, so I’m going to…” The baby whimpers again, even louder, so Dick starts walking to the stairs. The unspoken _for now_  hangs in the air behind him. “But kids grow up fast, Bruce. You might not have as much time as you think you do.”

 

—

 

They don’t tell Damian about the clones until he’s recovered enough. His condition is… volatile, and knowledge that more clones exist, that out there somewhere there might be  _more_  like the one that killed him, is too likely to trigger more nightmares, more barely-controllable fits of Lazarus-induced fear and rage.

But Damian doesn’t sleep much anymore and the babies cry frequently, loud enough to hear in every room of the manor when they scream in trio.

Finally, Bruce decides to take Damian to meet them, once the boy’s gone an entire week without a violent Lazarus episode and the worst of the chemicals are—hopefully—out of his system.

Damian peers into the cribs as Bruce stands back and watches, noticing with a pang how  _thin_  Damian is now. His face is gaunter and there are dark circles under his eyes. The pyjamas that were once becoming too small for him are now so baggy they’re barely hanging onto him.

“More clones,” he says quietly, staring down at one of them with an unreadable expression.

“I found them when I was searching for a Lazarus pit to take a sample of. Ra’s had his scientists experimenting on them. These are the only ones I found at the lab.” Bruce gently picks one yawning baby out of his crib—he’s  _reasonably_  certain that it’s the second one he found—and hands him to Damian. He has to adjust Damian’s arms so he’s holding the baby properly, the same way Alfred had to do for Bruce not too long ago. “They’re your… brothers.” Bruce tries the word, and immediately regrets that perhaps it was the wrong one.

Damian looks from the baby to Bruce. His blue eyes are uncertain and still tinged with green that may or may not fade, proof of what Bruce has done, proof of him being haunted by the pain and shock of being dragged back to life after such a horrible death. Bruce had tried to alter the chemicals that make up the Lazarus water, to synthesize it and improve it in a way that provided less harmful side-effects. It hadn’t made as much of a difference as he’d hoped.

But Damian is smiling now, a kind of smile that was rare even  _before_. Perhaps ‘brothers’ was the right word.

“What are their names?” Damian demands.

“They don’t— We haven’t chosen any. Yet.”

“That’s unacceptable,” says Damian. He scowls at his father accusingly. “I’ll think of names suitable for brothers of mine. Names that Mother would have chosen.”

He goes tense upon mentioning his mother, and Bruce steps forward and places a hand on his shoulder just in case, in an attempt to ground him. Or subdue him, if things get worse. He feels guilty not trusting his own son, but Damian’s holding an infant and Bruce still remembers how Damian destroyed his entire bedroom during one of his worse Lazarus episodes.

Nothing happens. Damian stays calm, in control. The child in his arms gives a happy gurgle and pats Damian’s cheek curiously. He must have grown quite attached to Damian already. Bruce can only hold onto one of them for a minute or two before they get upset and restless.

Damian takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “It… wasn’t her fault. What happened,” he says. “You need to know that.”

“I know.” Bruce squeezes Damian’s shoulder. He does know. He learned plenty after Leviathan crumbled, plenty of things that could have saved them death and destruction. “It’s going to be okay.”

The baby makes a disgruntled noise and waves his little arms clumsily. Damian wrinkles his nose in disgust. “I think—”

“I think it’s time we get Alfred to teach us how to change diapers,” says Bruce, taking the child from Damian—to the boy’s relief—and wrinkling his own nose. It’s definitely time.

 


End file.
